Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions.

This paper assesses a novel responsible conduct of research curriculum developed at the University of Oklahoma that focuses on metacognitive reasoning strategies that professionals use when making sense of professional issues that have ethical implications for science. To find out the overall effectiveness of the sensemaking approach, the authors also studied mental models of field experts, faculty, and graduate students who were both trained and untrained in sensemaking. The study found that sensemaking training has the potential to lead in a shift in mental model structure and introduces a new way for research to think about the novel, highly complex, and ambiguous ethical situations that research professionals often face in their daily lives.